The Balkan Express: Fragments From the Other Side of the War

By Slavenka Drakulic. W.W. Norton, 1993, 146 pp. List: $19.95; AET: $15.95.

Reviewed by Susan Bloor

Although the photo of Slavenka Drakulic on the cover of her book portrays a serene and sophisticated woman, she wears the serious, almost resigned expression of a person who fully comprehends how uncertain is the future before her. In many ways her expression reflects the mood of her country, Croatia, whose people have been devastated both physically and emotionally by a brutal and somewhat one-sided war with Serbia.

Bosnia is scarcely mentioned in this book, partially because most of it was written before the ruthless Serb (and later Croat) attacks on Bosnia began, and partially because of the self-centered perspective from which Drakulic writes. This is the story of her sufferings and her experiences in the war. Even when she interviews others for their experiences, she remains the main character, reporting how she is affected by what they relate.

As egocentric as the book is, it offers some wonderful insights from an enlightened and intelligent woman. Drakulic is one of the few Croats able to discuss Croatian nationalism without becoming either defensive or completely detached and overly analytical.

She resents being identified primarily as a Croat, but acknowledges that she is not really free to think or act otherwise. The "war is . . . reducing us to one dimension: the Nation. The trouble with this nationhood, however, is that whereas before I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character—and, yes, my nationality too—now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody because I am not a person anymore. I am one of 4.5 million Croats."

Drakulic belongs to that large segment of Croatian citizens who were born into the post-World War II Communist era. She is a child of Tito's Yugoslavia. For her generation, history began in 1941, and the war was directly and vividly experienced by her parents' generation. All of these facts go into the making of many of Croatia's current ills.

The Communists pulled a veil over pre-World War II history, just as Croatia's new government again is rearranging the past. This highly flexible approach to history provides shaky ground upon which to base a solid present and stable future, according to Drakulic: "The Croatian `new democracy' hasn't brought us anything yet but promises to believe in. The cost is high: renunciation of the whole past and sacrifice of the present.''

In The Balkan Express, the anguish of Balkan mothers is conveyed strongly. Drakulic has a daughter, and imagines in one of her essays how she would react if her child were a son about to go fight against the Serbs. In her imagination, she and her son argue. He wants revenge. She tries to convince him that it is not his war. In the end, he leaves for the front. "Although I am not religious, I know that I would spend the rest of my time frantically trying to strike a bargain with God: God, if you exist, take me and spare him."

Her empathy is touching as she compares a young soldier named Ivan to her would-be son. Her own daughter, however, no longer faces the dangers and horrors that Ivan has witnessed, having left Croatia before the war arrived in Zagreb.

Thanks to her connections and money, even Drakulic herself spent the bloodiest months of the war abroad. She recognizes that she has been spared the worst of her country's anguish, and that her relative wealth sets her apart from other Croats and allows her the objectivity to analyze so eloquently her own feelings, and the war in general.

Despite her privileged status, she connects to the subjects of her essays on a profound level, and their experiences sincerely move her. For Drakulic, the soldier who describes dispassionately his first kill is a victim of war. But there are countless other victims as well. Among them are the refugee who insists on wearing high heels despite the need for a more practical wardrobe, and Drakulic's own mother, who agonizes over whether to replace her late husband's tombstone, marked with a Communist star.

In The Balkan Express, Drakulic succeeds in describing war not just in terms of casualties and atrocities, but also in terms of the many ways in which war forever transforms all those whom it touches. By putting war into such human perspectives, her book makes it all the more terrifying.